Twenty years ago, I was having some meetings in a town on the Canadian prairies. After each session, as I greeted the Christians, I was disturbed to see a man, probably in his early seventies, guffawing and back-slapping his way through the crowd. The topic for the week was a solemn one, and his behavior, in my mind, was entirely out of place.
Don’t get me wrong. I think I have a sense of humor and like a good laugh. “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine” (Prov. 17:22). But this seemed so inappropriate. I read the Christians’ faces as disapproving, too. Every night it was the same thing.
On Thursday morning, I received a phone call at the house where I was staying. It was the Jokemeister. I was preparing for the meeting that evening, and the last thing I needed was my joke-for-the-day. I confess I was quite abrupt. But no joke was forthcoming. What was it he wanted?
“How’d you like to have lunch with me?” he queried.
(I thought to myself, This is the golden opportunity to speak to this brother about his flippant attitude.) “I think that would be fine,” I answered.
“Twelve o’clock, then?”
“Sure. I’ll be ready.” I still feel the residue of shame rising in my heart as I think of what I really meant by that last sentence.
At twelve o’clock sharp, a big boat of a Mercury, several years old, rolled up in front of the house. As I climbed in beside my host for the afternoon, he greeted me and then said, “Before lunch, if it’s alright with you, I’d like you to meet my family.”
“I’d like that.”
“My wife died a few years ago,” he said, his eyes misting. “It hasn’t been easy.”
I slipped my sword partway back into its sheath and thought I would wait for a more appropriate moment to, uh, deal with him.
We were heading out to the country, and soon pulled into the yard of a ramshackle farmhouse. There I met his daughter who was trying to hold the place together, pay the bills, raise the kids. It looked like she was losing ground. Her husband had walked out on her.
As I sat in the kitchen with the two of them, she poured her broken heart out on the table. I tried to say something to her about the Lord being our helper. I’m not sure it did much good, but it was certainly not the time to set her father straight about his superficial attitude. I pushed the sword all the way back into its scabbard. The jokes? He was just trying to make it through the day.
Our next stop was a nursing home in town. His younger son lived here, if “lived” is an appropriate word. He sat, limp, strapped into a wheelchair positioned in the afternoon sunshine. He had to be dressed, fed, propped up for the day, changed, and put to bed. There was little response, if any, as his father spoke some tender words into his ear.
We didn’t see his elder son, a prodigal. He had been incarcerated for writing bad checks repeatedly on his father’s account. From what I could tell, he had been the greatest heartache of the three. But I could also tell the father kept looking down the road toward the far country, waiting.
Surreptitiously I slipped the sword out the window as we headed for lunch at a local diner. I presume it lies rusted under its twentieth winter blanket. I am not interested in finding it. I have no use for it.
How many hurting Christians put on their mask with their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes each week? I do not know for sure, but my surmise is that the number is burgeoning. As our society unravels around us, it bears its sad influence into our families. Spurgeon’s advice to his students looking for job security was to go in for ministering to broken hearts. They would never be out of a job, he told them. How true that is today.
We’ll probably never see behind the masks if we only ask perfunctorily, “How are you?” as we slip past on our way to the Sunday morning coffee break.
“Encourage one another daily.”